Time for a new CPU, and what better way to get starting with the 6502 that with the 8 bit computers from Atari. Sure, you might say that C64 or even NES would be more obvious platforms, but not for me. I am Atari to the bone, and despite C64 being more popular in some parts of the world, I don’t own one. I do own an Atari 130 XE though, and I recently purchased an SIO2SD device from Lotharek which enables me to actually test my code on the real thing.

Hey, I made a couple of Atari ST intros this summer. First up was Bacon, which was released at Sommarhack 2015. I started to plan it when there was still snow outside, but I did almost all of the coding the during the week before the party. The release was thrown together for High Coast Hack in Härnösand four weeks later. As I had participated with an intro the last to years, I wanted to have something this year as well.

This blog has not seen much action lately, but my coding has been more or less constant. There are code for a few more platforms in my Hello World project, and a few month ago I started writing some code for a SEGA Mega Drive game. It’s no secret that the SMD are one of the platforms that now have a Hello World implementation. I just need to take time to finish up a blog post about it.

Last weekend while digging around on one of my USB sticks, I found some old test code I wrote for the GBA over 10 years ago. I though the files were lost forever, so I was quite happy that I found them. The code itself was written in an obscure assembler for Windows, so my first goal was to port it to a more modern tool that preferably could cross assemble on both my PC and Mac.

Long overdue, it time for another Hello World hack, and this time it’s for the 8bit console Sega Master System (SMS). Based on the Z80 it will be the first system in this series that is not based on the Motorola M68000 CPU. I learned to code the SMS in 2005, and have release two tiny demo hacks under the alias blind io (you can find them here if really want to see them).

Weeks later than I had originally planned, the Amiga OCS is now greeted with a small Hello World sample. Since this is my first time coding the Amiga, most of the time was spent on reading various hardware documentation on what registers to set and why. As I have somewhat more experience with the Atari ST, I will comment on the difference between the two platforms as well as trying to explain what the Amiga code does.

This is the first part of the Hello World Project. As I’ve been an Atari ST owner since the late 80’s, and still code on my ST occasionally, it was an easy choice to begin with this platform. I could write most of this code without looking through documentation, with a few exceptions, like the OS function code number. Before I begin to explain the code, I should tell you that this code is not very system friendly.

Since a few month back, I am no longer enrolled in Apples developer program for iOS. A side effect of this is that any application I had on App Store are no longer available. The major reason for this is that I don’t have an iOS device that can run anything newer than iOS 4, and my old iPhone 3G has troubles even running that. I am planning to buy the new iPhone 5 when it is released.

About a year ago, I got fed up with just sitting around at home thinking of all the programming I could be doing, instead of watching TV-series. Triggered by a tweet someone in my feed retweeted, I decided to start with the project. The tweet was something like Make a game, not an engine, which made me realize that I had made two or three more or less working engines, but never actually used them.

Since demicode have been more or less dormant for the last couple of years, due to me having a day job to pay my rent , this site will change. From not being used at all my intention is now to use this blog as a outlet for all my programming related blogging. I realized that incorporating such blog posts in my more personal blog, that I’ve had since the beginning of the previous decade, was not really what my handful of readers would appreciate.